Subjectivity, identity and desire -- Gender -- Queer -- Symbolic violence -- Ethics.

Contents Preface Acknowledgments 1 Ethics and Evolution The Secret Chain Epistemology from an Evolutionary Point of View Ethics from an Evolutionary Point of View Morals and Models Evolution and Ethics 2 Altruism, Benevolence, and Self-Love in Eighteenth Century British Moral Philosophy Introduction Benevolence and Self-Love from Hobbes to Mackintosh The Eighteenth Century Legacy 3 The Moral Realm of Nature: Nineteenth Century Views on Ethics and Evolution Introduction Natural Facts and Natural Values Nature, Culture, and Conflict 4 Human Nature Introduction The (...) Concept of Human Nature Human Nature and Moral Theory Human Nature and Ideology Does Darwinism Undermine the Concept of Human Nature? 5 Three Contemporary Approaches to Evolutionary Ethics Introduction The Wisdom of the Genes: The Sociobiology of Ethics Richard Alexander and the Biological Basis of Morality Robert Richards and the Revised Theory General Conclusion 6 Darwinism and the Moral Status of Animals Introduction Singer's Expanding Circle Argument James Rachels on "Moral Individualism" Rodd on the Rights of Animals and Our Duties Toward Them Conclusion 7 Final Reflections Summary of the Argument The Biological Roots of Morality The Relevance of Darwin for Moral Philosophy Bibliography Index. (shrink)

Emily Brady provides a systematic account of aesthetics in relation to the natural environment, offering a critical understanding of what aesthetic appreciation ...

This book is an account of the important influence on the development of mathematical logic of Charles S. Peirce and his student O.H. Mitchell, through the work of Ernst Schroder, Leopold Lowenheim, and Thoralf Skolem. As far as we know, this book is the first work delineating this line of influence on modern mathematical logic.

This chapter focuses on the question of whether true belief can have final value because it answers our ‘intellectual interest’ or ‘natural curiosity’. The idea is that sometimes we are interested in the truth on some issue not for any ulterior purpose, but simply because we are curious about that issue. It is argued that this approach fails to provide an adequate explanation of the final value of true belief, since there is an unbridgeable gap between our valuing the truth (...) on some issue for its own sake, and that truth's being valuable for its own sake. (shrink)

This volume is an indispensable reference for a wide range of scholars working across multidisciplinary fields of inquiry that focus on British and continental histories of medicine and sexuality, gender history and studies of nineteenth ...

Anita Chari revives the concept of reification from Marx and the Frankfurt School to spotlight the resistance to neoliberal capitalism now forming at the level of political economy and at the more sensate, experiential level of subjective transformation. Reading art by Oliver Ressler, Zanny Begg, Claire Fontaine, Jason Lazarus, and Mika Rottenberg, as well as the politics of Occupy Wall Street, Chari identifies practices through which artists and activists have challenged neoliberalism's social and political logics, exposing its inherent tensions (...) and contradictions. (shrink)

This chapter suggests that, when considering the philosophical problem of other minds, we distinguish between "thick" and "thin" versions of it. While traditional approaches take the problem to be a thick one, more recent work can be seen as addressing only a thin variant. Dretske, while acknowledging the thick problem, proposes a perceptual model of our knowledge of other minds which addresses only the thin version. The chapter proposes that, in the place of the thick problem, we consider the quality (...) of our interactions with others. Following Wittgenstein, it suggests that where individuals share a nature their interactions exhibit a quality that it calls "depth." Where that nature is not, or is only partially, shared, there one might expect to find the quality of the interaction between persons disturbed. The chapter suggests that this disturbance might explain the impaired quality of interaction between autistic and non-autistic individuals. (shrink)

How do I know whether there are any minds beside my own? This problem of other minds in philosophy raises questions which are at the heart of all philosophical investigations--how it is that we know, what is in the mind, and whether we can be certain about any of our beliefs. In this book, Anita Avramides begins with a historical overview of the problem from the Ancient Skeptics to Descartes, Malebranche, Locke, Berkeley, Reid, and Wittgenstein. The second part of (...) the book investigates the views of influential contemporary philosophers such as Strawson, Davidson, Nagel and Searle. (shrink)

Das Eröffnungskapitel von Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes hat wegen der Tragweite ihrer Behauptung, das Wahre der sinnlichen Gewißheit sei identisch mit dem nur in der Sprache zu erfassenden Allgemeinen, und wegen der äußersten Komprimiertheit der Argumentation, mit der Hegel seine These darzulegen beansprucht, eine Vielzahl verschiedener Interpretationen hervorgerufen. Abweichend von bisherigen Ansätzen betont Brady Bowman in seiner Studie die positive Funktion der sinnlichen Gewißheit des Absoluten als Ausgangspunkt von Hegels "Darstellung des erscheinenden Wissens". Indem er die Analyse der z.T. (...) stark rekonstruktionsbedürftigen Argumentation zu den philosophiehistorischen Referenzen und zum Gesamtzusammenhang der Phänomenologie des Geistes in Beziehung setzt, liefert er eine umfassende Interpretation des Textes. Dabei beleuchtet der Autor zugleich die Hintergründe in der antiken Philosophie, im klassischem Empirismus, in der Philosophie des Common Sense sowie im Umfeld der klassischen deutschen Philosophie; zugleich jedoch verfolgt er systematische Bezüge bis in die Sprachphilosophie der Gegenwart. (shrink)

The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI) is an ontology that provides terms with precisely defined meanings to describe all aspects of how investigations in the biological and medical domains are conducted. OBI re-uses ontologies that provide a representation of biomedical knowledge from the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) project and adds the ability to describe how this knowledge was derived. We here describe the state of OBI and several applications that are using it, such as adding semantic expressivity to (...) existing databases, building data entry forms, and enabling interoperability between knowledge resources. OBI covers all phases of the investigation process, such as planning, execution and reporting. It represents information and material entities that participate in these processes, as well as roles and functions. Prior to OBI, it was not possible to use a single internally consistent resource that could be applied to multiple types of experiments for these applications. OBI has made this possible by creating terms for entities involved in biological and medical investigations and by importing parts of other biomedical ontologies such as GO, Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) and Phenotype Attribute and Trait Ontology (PATO) without altering their meaning. OBI is being used in a wide range of projects covering genomics, multi-omics, immunology, and catalogs of services. OBI has also spawned other ontologies (Information Artifact Ontology) and methods for importing parts of ontologies (Minimum information to reference an external ontology term (MIREOT)). The OBI project is an open cross-disciplinary collaborative effort, encompassing multiple research communities from around the globe. To date, OBI has created 2366 classes and 40 relations along with textual and formal definitions. The OBI Consortium maintains a web resource providing details on the people, policies, and issues being addressed in association with OBI. (shrink)

The Gricean account of language is at the center of much current work in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind. Anita Avramides maintains that Grice's paradigm can be used to defend very different conceptions of mind and of meaning. In this clearly argued book she describes Grice's analysis of meaning and proposes two interpretations of it, one reductive and one nonreductive. Much current work in cognitive science assumes that the content of words and thoughts can be (...) explained in naturalistic terms. A leading idea (advanced mainly by Stephen Schiffer and Brian Loar) is that the naturalistic account of content will proceed in two stages: a reduction of the semantic features of word; to the contents of propositional attitudes and then a reduction of the latter to physical or functional notions. The appeal of Grice's work on meaning to this two stage reductionist strategy is that Gricean definitions seem to provide the only way of reducing the semantic to the psychological, a reduction that is required for a naturalistic account of intentionality. While Avramides defends the method of analysis as one suited to the concept of meaning, she rejects a reductive interpretation of the analysis. She argues that any attempt to reduce the semantic to the psychological leads to a mistaken conception of mind. She exposes the assumptions behind the reductive interpretation and offers fresh and original arguments for the antireductionist position. Against the reductive Gricean she defends the idea that there is a deep epistemological symmetry between semantic and propositional attitude notions, a result of which is that semantically characterized linguistic behavior is central to our concept of belief. Anita Avramides is Lecturer in Philosophy at The Queens College, The University of Oxfor. A Bradford Book. (shrink)

One of the most intriguing of philosophical puzzles concerns other minds. How do you know there are any? Yes, you're surrounded by living organisms that look and behave much as you do. They even say they have minds. But do they? Perhaps other humans are mindless zombies: like you on the outside, but lacking any inner conscious life, including emotions, thoughts, experiences and even pain. What grounds do you possess for supposing that other humans aren't zombies? Perhaps less than you (...) think. Anita Avramides tackles this fascinating question. (shrink)

'Anita L. Allen breaks new ground...A stunning indictment of women's status in contemporary society, her book provides vital original scholarly research and insight.' |s-NEW DIRECTIONS FOR WOMEN.

Miranda Fricker's book Epistemic Injustice is an original and stimulating contribution to contemporary epistemology. Fricker's main aim is to illustrate the ethical aspects of two of our basic epistemic practices, namely conveying knowledge to others and making sense of our own social experiences. In particular, she wishes to investigate the idea that there are prevalent and distinctively epistemic forms of injustice related to these aspects of our epistemic lives, injustices which reflect the fact that our actual epistemic practices are socially (...) situated. Most of the book focuses on two such forms – Testimonial Injustice and Hermeneutical Injustice – and on the epistemic virtues required to counteract them.Testimonial Injustice occurs when a hearer fails, because of prejudice, to give due credit to the word of a speaker. For instance, in the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, the jury in the trial of Tom Robinson fail to regard his testimony as credible because he …. (shrink)

Direct theories of the virtues maintain that an explanation of why some virtuous trait counts as valuable should ultimately appeal to the value of its characteristic motive or aim. In this paper I argue that, if we take the idea of a direct approach to virtue theory seriously, we should favour a view according to which virtue involves knowledge. I raise problems for recent “agent-based” and “end-based” versions of the direct approach, show how my account proves preferable to these, and (...) defend it against a number of objections. (shrink)

It is possible to tease out two questions in connection with the epistemological problem of other minds: (i) How do I know what others think and feel? and (ii) How do I know that others think and feel? Fred Dretske offers a perceptual account of our knowledge of other minds that yields an answer to (i) but not (ii). Quassim Cassam uses Dretske’s perceptual account to show how we can answer both (i) and (ii). In this paper I show how (...) we can use Dretske’s work to understand some work by Stanley Cavell. I suggest that, where Dretske claims that we cannot answer (ii), Cavell holds that (ii) is a question that reflects a misunderstanding of our relations to others. In the place of asking how I can know that others think and feel, Cavell holds that I must acknowledge the other. And at the heart of this acknowledgment is an acceptance of others as separate from me. I must acknowledge the other as an other to me. (shrink)

This book departs from the premise that context represents a complex relational configuration which can no longer be conceived as an analytic prime but rather requires a parts-whole perspective to capture its inherent dynamism. The edited volume presents a collection of papers which examine the connectedness between context, contextualization and entextualization. They address the questions how meaning and speech acts are situated in context, how both are influenced by context, how context influences speech acts and meaning, how context is imported (...) into the discourse, and how context is entextualized in discourse. The papers cover institutional and non-institutional contexts, the language of Greek laws, political discourse, confrontational media discourse and task-oriented face-to-face and back-to-back interactions. They reflect current moves in pragmatics and discourse analysis to cross disciplinary and methodological boundaries by integrating relevant premises and insights, in particular cognition, adaptive action, negotiation of meaning, sequentiality, recipient design and genre. (shrink)

The article shows the importance of a Christmas carol in the poetic imagination of Tadeusz Nowak. First of all is the presence of a word carol itself, especially because many poems, titled carol are not even connected with the carol’s motives. Then it’s vital, how Nowak is referring to traditional carols and how he is reinterpreting typical themes connected with it, such as: annunciation, motherhood (and parenthood generally), relation between man and animals, identity of the Other, of someone, who (like (...) Jesus, Holly Family) is different than everybody else. It turns out that words specifically connected with carol like: hay, the Star of Bethlehem, Christmas eve, chorus from polish folk song hej kolęda, kolęda are part of his language, he uses them to describe his world, apart from idyllic associations, even apart from Christmas context. (shrink)

Feminist Ethics provides an overview of feminist contributions to normative ethics, moral psychology, and metaethics. It argues that through their criticisms of traditional ethics and proposals for changes, feminists are advancing 'robust agency,' an account of ideal moral and rational agency that promises to give us better responses than those given in traditional ethics to problems in ethics, including how we know our duties, the kind of persons we should strive to become, and why we should act morally.

Can the government stick us with privacy we don't want? It can, it does, and according to this author, may need to do more of it. Privacy is a foundational good, she argues, a necessary tool in the liberty-lover's kit for a successful life. A nation committed to personal freedom must be prepared to mandate inalienable, liberty-promoting privacies for its people, whether they eagerly embrace them or not. The eight chapters of this book are reflections on public regulation of privacy (...) at home; isolation and confinement for punitive and health reasons; religious modesty attire; erotic nudity; workplace and professional confidentiality; racial privacy; online transactions; social networking; and the collection, use and storage of electronic data. (shrink)

This article engages Axel Honneth’s recent work on Georg Lukács’ concept of reification in order to formulate a politically relevant and historically specific critique of capitalism that is applicable to theorizing contemporary democratic practice. I argue that Honneth’s attempt to reorient the critique of reification within the terms of a theory of recognition has done so at the cost of sacrificing the core of the concept, which forged a connection between the socio-political analysis of capitalist domination and an analysis of (...) the unengaged, spectatorial stance of human beings toward the world, showing how they together impede emancipatory social transformation. In order to accomplish the unfinished task of rendering the critique of reification applicable to contemporary critical theory, I seek to synthesize the advantages of Honneth’s approach, which focuses on the normative aspects of the critique of reification, with Lukács’ emphasis on the practical, political-economic dimensions of reification and the historically specific pathologies of the capitalist social form. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The question of this article is whether the saturated phenomenon as articulated in the early work of Jean-Luc Marion may appear within language and history, or in other words how a non- or extra-horizonal event can appear within the horizons necessary for communication and communality. This problem is significant, among other reasons, because saturated aesthetic, ethical, and religious phenomena constitute important bases for communal values. The article argues that Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophy of language offers resources that allow us to (...) understand how a saturated phenomenon can appear communicably and communally without sacrificing the irreducible excessiveness of its appearance. The author draws on parallels between Marion and Gadamer to argue that the poetic word and the conversation present possibilities of the saturated phenomenon occurring within language and history, and suggests the “saturated question” as a name for this mode of appearance. (shrink)

This paper relates Donaldson and Dunfee’s Integrative Social Contracts Theory to the problem of gender discrimination. We make the assumption that multinational managers might seek some guidance from ISCT to resolve ethical issues of gender discrimination in countries indifferent or hostile to gender equaIity. The role of Donaldson and Dunfee’s “hypernorms” seems especially cruciaI, and we find that, under their writings thus far, no “hypernorms” exist to make unethical the most blatant acts of sex discrimination in a host country whose (...) local norms tolerate such discrimination. The genesis of “hypernorms” as “global moral minimums” is recounted, and specific application of ISCT to a familiar ethics case (“A Foreign Assignment”) is provided. (shrink)

One of the most dominant approaches to semantics for relevant (and many paraconsistent) logics is the Routley-Meyer semantics involving a ternary relation on points. To some (many?), this ternary relation has seemed like a technical trick devoid of an intuitively appealing philosophical story that connects it up with conditionality in general. In this paper, we respond to this worry by providing three different philosophical accounts of the ternary relation that correspond to three conceptions of conditionality. We close by briefly discussing (...) a general conception of conditionality that may unify the three given conceptions. (shrink)

How do we acquire knowledge of the thoughts and feelings of others? Knowing Other Minds brings together ten original essays that address various questions in philosophy and in empirical cognitive science which arise from our everyday social interaction with other people.

The aim of the present paper is to evaluate the notion of collective guilt feeling both in the light of research in affectivity and in collective intentionality. The paper is divided into an introduction and three main sections. Section 1) highlights relevant features of guilt‐family emotions such as the relation between feeling guilt and objective guilt, the relation between feeling guilt and its content, and the relation between feeling guilt and the ‘self’. Moreover, the distinction between feeling guilt and feeling (...) regret is given due attention. Section 2) examines Margaret Gilbert's arguments in favor of a collectivist view of collective guilt feeling , according to which groups do genuinely feel guilt. Against the collectivist position I argue for an individualist ‘membership account’ of collective guilt feeling in terms of individual members' we‐feeling of guilt. The membership account of collective guilt feeling is vindicated on grounds of a naturalist and non‐judgmentalist understanding of emotions, as well as on the logic of personal pronouns. It combines individualism regarding the subject of the feeling with collectivism regarding the irreducibility of we‐feelings and provides, as I further argue, the required moral force attributed to collective guilt feeling. The concern of section 3) is the question of the appropriate emotional response to collective wrongdoing. I argue against the view that group members are categorically ‘committed to feel guilt as a body’ for wrongdoings committed by the group. Given that individual members often do not participate in their groups' wrongdoings, it seems unjust to impose a requirement for feeling guilt upon them. I suggest that in a general account of the appropriate assessment of collective wrongdoing, feeling regret is the better candidate than feeling guilt for the role of the minimally required emotional response.For us collectively to feel guilt over our action A is for us to be jointly committed to feeling guilt as a body over our action A. [. . .] The parties [. . .] constitute, as far as possible, a single subject of guilt feelings .[A] collective cannot respond affectively [. . .], only its constitutive members can. The lack of an affective counter‐response is troubling, because the efficacy of responses of accountability partially depends upon affect. The response of shame, guilt, and regret help to register the significance of the harm. (shrink)

Today, more corporations disclose information about their environmental performance in response to stakeholder demands of environmental responsibility and accountability. What information do corporations disclose on their websites? This paper investigates the environmental management policies and practices of the 200 largest corporations in the world. Based on a content analysis of the environmental reports of Fortune’s Global 200 companies, this research analyzes the content of corporate environmental disclosures with respect to the following seven areas: environmental planning considerations, top management support to (...) the institutionalization of environmental concerns, environmental structures and organizing specifics, environmental leadership activities, environmental control, external validations or certifications of environmental programs, and forms of corporate environmental disclosures. (shrink)